It is not as though Canadians are recoiling from the Truth and Reconciliation report's findings, exactly, but the whole subject is quickly becoming fraught with rhetorical leg-hold traps and improvised explosive devices of the most crudely polemical kind.

Final negotiations proceeded well until Macdonald fell asleep with his candle still burning, and was badly burned by a fire that he and Cartier put out with the water from their jugs in their hotel rooms.